Barbs fly at Teamsters recertification petition hearing

October 01, 2003|By Beth Anne Piehl News-Review staff writer

The union decertification petition filed by striking nurse Dennis Johnson is an open attempt to gauge whether a majority of the nurses still want Teamsters representation by giving them the chance to vote them out.

Or, it's a total sham meant to ensure reaffirmation of the Teamsters and is an abuse of the petition process allowed under national labor law.

Depends on who - the Teamsters and Johnson, or Northern Michigan Hospital and its attorney - is asked.

And now, it's a point for the National Labor Relations Board to consider as it moves toward setting a date for a decertification election that has two petitioners and plenty of complexity.

At a nearly all-day hearing Tuesday, representatives of the four parties now involved in the petition and decertification election process met with Ethan Ray, hearing officer with the NLRB.

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Present were Don Scharg, an attorney with the Fishman Group, NMH's legal firm, and Eugene Kaminski, NMH vice president of human resources; petitioners Laura Hart, a working nurse, and her attorney, Philip Nantz, of Grand Rapids, and striking nurse and petitioner Dennis Johnson; and Teamsters lawyer Ted Iorio and Teamsters business agent Sharon Norton. About 15 community residents also attended.

The purpose of the hearing, called by the NLRB, was to raise any issues about the actual election process before a vote date is set, as the Teamsters and NMH could not agree on election terms. Some in dispute include who should be eligible to vote and whether mail ballots should be allowed.

At issue is whether and when a decertification election will be scheduled that could remove the Teamsters Union as the nurses' bargaining unit, or reaffirm the nurses' original majority vote. Two petitioners have filed - Hart, the working nurse, and Johnson, the striking nurse.

Tuesday's hearing followed the lines of a court proceeding with attorneys, witnesses, cross-examination and objections.

Scharg had the floor first, and he spent a couple hours attempting to portray Johnson as a strong union supporter with improper motives in filing his petition.

Under labor law, the NLRB has the authority to toss out a petition if it finds it invalid or improper.

"It's a sham petition that is only seeking reaffirmation and a new election … This petition is not filed seeking an actual decertification election," Scharg said.

Johnson denied Scharg's assertions, and they went round and round on the issue.

"Do you want the Teamsters to stop being your bargaining representative?" Scharg asked.

"That's what the petition says," Johnson replied.

After several similar go-betweens, Iorio objected.

"This is not an adversarial hearing - it's a fact-finding mission," he said.

Scharg and Iorio got into a heated discussion on whether Johnson should even be allowed to be asked about his motives and feelings on the Teamsters; ultimately, Ray allowed some probing in that direction.

Scharg laid out another scenario to further his view on Johnson's motives: The Nov. 14 one-year anniversary of the strike is approaching. If a decertification election is not held within one year, by Nov. 14, 2003, nurses still out on strike may not vote in the election if they have been permanently replaced. If Hart were to withdraw her petition, there would not be an election, and Scharg suggested Johnson's motive was to ensure union-supporting strikers have a vote. He categorized this as a misuse of the petition process.

Hart's attorney, Nantz, agreed.

"If you connect the dots, this is a thin-veiled attempt at recertification," he said.

Iorio said later that Johnson's motives shouldn't be relevant to whether the petition remains, and those motives are only seeking to determine whether a majority of nurses still want Teamsters representation, personal feelings aside.

On the stand, Johnson, a member of the Local 406 bargaining committee, also said his filing of the petition was partly in response to striking nurse concerns about a letter sent out by hospital CEO Tom Mroczkowski on Sept. 9 to working nurses that detailed the decertification petition process, among other items.

Iorio also strongly denied any Teamsters' involvement in Johnson's petition efforts, as that is a violation of the national labor law, though Scharg called Iorio as a witness and looked to connect him to conversations with striking RNs about the filing of Johnson's petition.

When some striking RNs asked for assistance in the petition process, Iorio, however, said he told them no: "We wanted to make sure we didn't have our fingerprints on this."